Thursday, October 14, 2010

As if the trailer for Marquette Madness didn’t get you excited enough for Friday, there are many other aspects of the Marquette basketball program that have people chirping about this team. I can’t speak from experience because I wasn’t really a fan of Marquette basketball during the Final 4 run and maybe it’s because Twitter and Facebook are bigger than ever, but this seems to be the most hyped team in a while.

Jimmy and DJO played a ton of minutes last season and can only get better with more experience. People are saying great things about Cadougan and we'll hopefully see why he was ranked so high coming out of high school. There's loads of hype about Vander Blue, Jae Crowder, and the rest of the newcomers. The list goes on...

With the recent news that 2012 stud recruit J.P Tokoto might also be at the AL Friday night, there is reason to believe that Marquette is getting closer and closer to being one of the nation’s top programs. Sure, just because Tokoto is coming to madness doesn’t mean he’s committing to be a Golden Eagle (he also has Duke, UNC, Kentucky, and Kansas on his radar). But to be mentioned in the same sentence with schools like that is an accomplishment in its own right.

Another positive is that our team is healthy (knock on every piece of wood you can find). Last season at this time, DJO and Cadougan were both down with injuries and were unable to complete boot camp. As far as I know, every member of this squad completed boot camp. Obviously it’s a long season, but it’s nice to have arguments about starting lineups and substitutes compared to lack of depth like we’ve had for a couple years.

To be a homer and include some close friends in this, too, Marquette’s student media features some of the best and brightest minds in terms of current college students. We’ve all seen the work Brad Galli, Todd Warner, and the rest of the MUTV Sports crew put out there. This year, Andrei Greska is the MU Tribune sports editor and will without doubt produce some great material on the men’s basketball team. Andrei kept a blog throughout this summer’s World Cup and currently has a blog about the MU women’s volleyball team. So after every game when you’ve read CS, argued with Chicos on MUScoop, looked at Rosiak’s recap, etc., check out mutvsports.com and marquettetribune.org for their game recaps and next day analysis.

This upcoming season seems to be creating the most buzz I’ve seen in recent years – pun absolutely intended.

I hope to be at madness Friday night and will provide many more updates on twitter at timkraft13.